Summary:
A reflection on intersubjectivity
I recently attended a presentation by Donnel B. Stern, PhD, Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Stern, who also founded and edits the Routledge book series Psychoanalysis in a New Key, offered a deeply moving exploration of how we come to possess ourselves.
Stern’s thesis centered on the shift from the analyst as an interpreter to the analyst as a vital witness. Drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott and the British Independent Group, Stern distinguished between simply telling a patient what they feel and truly witnessing their experience, which allows them to feel themselves feeling. As Winnicott (1960) suggested, it is within a holding environment that the True Self—the source of spontaneity and aliveness—can begin to emerge, as opposed to the reactive, compliant False Self built as a defense.
Stern emphasized that it isn't enough for an analyst (or a romantic partner) to simply see what's happening. They must be a trusted other who justifies that trust by acting as a mirror. When someone truly recognizes our experience, it gives us the safety to look at it ourselves. Their witnessing allows us to begin witnessing ourselves. He noted that the moment you sense yourself in the midst of that process, the experience shifts: it is no longer something happening to you, but something being lived by you. It honors the interdependence of the dyad and acknowledges that we cannot become ourselves by ourselves.
This is particularly relevant when considering states of "not-me" or embeddedness, in which a person does not just feel an emotion—they are the emotion. The clinical goal, Stern (2023) argues, is to help the patient differentiate: to move from being collapsed into an experience to being able to observe and live it. This requires a trusted other who acts as a mirror, justifying that trust through their presence. The work is bidirectional. As Stern (2023) writes, the process of "setting the other at a distance" to emerge from embeddedness must happen repeatedly in both directions. Patients must step back from their fusion with the analyst, and analysts must step back from their own assumptions about the patient. It is this mutual emergence that allows the analyst to truly appreciate the patient's otherness—their separate, unknowable self.
The implication is profound: We cannot become ourselves by ourselves. We require the gaze of a trusted other to bridge the gap into self-possession.
References:
Stern, D. B. (2023). Distance and relation: Emerging from embeddedness in the other. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 71(4), 641–668.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp. 140–152). International Universities Press.